Search form

Dinesh D’Souza, the Right’s Michael Moore

I lost an hour and a half of my life Sunday at a matinee showing
of the sleeper-hit documentary 2016: Obama’s America. But
I kept the stub for tax purposes, and you get to read this column.
With luck, we’ll both end up just slightly worse off for the
experience.

“It may seem incredible,” D’Souza wrote, “to
suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is
espoused by his son, the President of the United States.”

True enough: That theory wasn’t remotely credible when D’Souza
advanced it in Forbes, and it’s even more ludicrous on the silver
screen.

D’Souza, 2016’s narrator, stresses his commonalities
with the president: born the same year, both with third-world
parentage, both steeped in an anticolonial tradition. “I get
it,” D’Souza assures us, which is why he alone has the secret
decoder ring that can explain Obama’s positions on the war on
terror, Israel, the Falkland Islands and much else besides.

Putting aside D’Souza’s distortions of those positions, it’s a
bit odd to hang a charge of anti-Americanism on insufficiently
passionate attachment to Israel and British jurisdiction over the
Falklands.

Odder still is D’Souza’s claim that Obama wanted to close Gitmo
because “he sees [jihadis] as freedom fighters.” If so,
you have to wonder why Obama keeps killing his “freedom
fighters” with remote-controlled robot assassins.

Incredibly, D’Souza cites Obama’s decision to attack a North
African country, Libya, as evidence of an Afrocentric,
anticolonialist worldview — Obama should have attacked Iran and
Syria, too, D’Souza suggests. But he never mentions the president’s
construction of new drone and spy-plane bases, and our expanding
troop presence throughout Africa. Kenyan anticolonialism ain’t
exactly what it used to be.

When D’Souza turns to the home front, 2016 gets less
credible still. He makes much of a 1965 journal article by Barack
Sr., “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” In it, the
Dreamfather suggested that a 100 percent income tax would be
permissible if it benefited the people.

“Is this what Obama means by ‘paying our fair share?’
” D’Souza asks.

Obviously not. Whatever Obama Sr.’s difficulty grasping the
Laffer curve (somebody should have drawn it on a bar napkin for
him), Junior’s position is the same as his 2008 Democratic rivals’:
Let the Bush tax cuts expire for top earners, and go back to
Clinton-era rates. A lousy idea, but hardly “Our
Socialism,” or anybody else’s.

“Then there was the health care bill” D’Souza segues.
But who needs a decoder ring to explain why, like every Democratic
president of the post-WWII era save Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama
pushed for universal health insurance? Does
“anticolonialism” explain Obama’s embrace of a plan
cooked up in a conservative think tank and first implemented by his
2012 Republican opponent?

The whole cinematic mess is the mirror image of Left-wing
fascination with Skull and Bones, Haliburton and George W. Bush’s
alleged Oedipal complex as explanations for the Iraq War. At least
Michael Moore’s crackpot documentaries provide a few impish laughs.
In 2016, all the yuks are unintentional.

At one point, we look over D’Souza’s shoulder while he Googles
the president’s half-brother, “George Obama.” The shot
reveals the classic facemorph picture of “George W.
Obama” on the top line “image” results.

It’s a revealing moment. Despite their disparate backgrounds,
both presidents backed expanded executive power over the economy,
in surveillance and in wars abroad.

We don’t need psychobiography to explain why presidents
continually seek to expand their own power over the people. It’s in
their nature, as the scorpion explained to the frog.